31 March 2009

The Animation Breakdown Weekend at Tate Modern has now been and gone. If you missed it never fear - the films from the Computer Baroque programme will be on animateprojects.org from mid-April and the Study Day presentations and Q&As will be online soon...

In the meantime, you can read the transcript of the presentation that Belgian curators María Palacios Cruz and Stoffel Debuysere gave at the Study Day, here on Stoffel's blog Diagonal Thoughts. The presentation focused on the Drawn to Life programme that Stoffel and Maria had previously shown at the Maison des Cultures Saint-Gilles, Brussels, in November 2008.

19 March 2009

Vital London lister kultureflash has posted a great write up on the Animation Breakdown weekend..witty, informed and astute...(scroll down to the Friday 20 March listing...)

One conspicuous region where negotiations are still taking place, borders are drawn and redrawn, boundaries blurred and sharpened, is that occupied by animation -- a field still reaching wildly off in all directions but with a unique capacity to both captivate and criticize. And you don't need an art degree (or three) to know when you like what you see.

10 March 2009

It is getting close and we are getting very excited. Though of course there's Flatpack before then.

All the Animation Breakdown speakers are confirmed. And we've posted biogs to show how impressive the line up is. The day starts with a talk by Belgian curators Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacios Cruz, and they'll be interspersing words with films, including Kota Ezawa's The Simpson Verdict and Ken Jacobs' Capitalism : slavery.

The tapes and discs for the Computer Baroque screening programme are nearly all here - and John Witney's Victory Sausage is on its way from the Academy of Film Arts and Sciences no less... And if you've never seen David Blair's seminar WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, now's the opportunity to rectify and even ask him a few questions.

Image: The City is No Longer Safe (Butler Brothers), showing in the Computer Baroque programme.

Artprojx are presenting a rare opportunity to enjoy Winterreise (2003), a characteristically haunting and beautiful feature length film by Bristol based artist Mariele Neudecker - perhaps best known for her 'tank works'. It was made in collaboration with Opera North, with a Schubert song cycle as the soundtrack for 24 short films.

The screening is at 1pm, Monday, 30 March, at the Prince Charles Cinema, London WC2 (Artprojx's regular screening venue). And it's the first in a new series of matinee screenings, which all seems very civilised to us.

We are looking forward to Hilary Powell's film Light Years Away, which has its outdoor premiere next Wednesday, 18 March,6.30 - 8.30pm, under Archway Tower, by Archway tube station, London N19. It's one of what looks like an exemplary series of serious but engaging public site projects commissioned as part of the Archway Investigations and Responses programme.

Light Years Away is being shown where it was made - and there'll be a roller rink too.

You can see Hilary's film The Games here. Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw - not an easy man to please unless you're Peter Jackson - called it "a wacky, audacious, often rather beautiful comedy satirising Riefensthalian pomposity." He's not wrong, and it augurs well for the new one.